Mainline Florida: Link to Mainline Florida.
I am making more use of links, music and visual. Click on them and then you might have a second link to search. Some locations, such as YouTube generate revenue for your "free" viewing by running ads, so be patient. On occasion there is a "skip ad" button. Sometimes it will load and start when you go there, sometimes you need to click on the white arrow in the red box.
I hope you enjoy the updates to my art and life as presented in this blog. IF you don't like the political stuff and don't want to receive future blogs just say so, no hard feelings. So far, only five have taken me up on the offer. With that in mind, remember: BELOW THE FOLD is where (most) of the controversial stuff is placed. Sometimes stuff is a hybrid, say humor and political. Nevertheless, I do this blog for me, it clears my mind and then I do it to share stuff I think is interesting, fun, needed to be considered, etc. I like, also, the feedback I receive, either on a specific article or the concept in general. Right now there are about 70 of you who receive this directly. Claude
ART:
I am going to get back into my art, I have resumed live model sessions (see recent previous blogs), have signed up for three 2-hour demonstrations at Bonita Center for Arts:
Abstract Painting & Mixed Media Techniques with Claudia Mengel
Expressive Watercolors: Flowers To Figures with Rogers
Watercolor: The Florida Landscape with Popadics
Also in April in Naples, Plein Air 5-day workshop with Morgan Samuel Price, and again in August in Estes Park CO.
Meanwhile, I took a class at Apple on how to use my app Procreate on the iPad…first attempt
OTHER’S:
ART IN A DIFFERENT WAY: Naples Botanical Garden visit. The garden still shows the effects of hurricane IAN; however, the orchid garden was in full bloom…
Recent drive to Gallery and book signing, Clyde Butcher and wife Niki.
I purchased a print
And one by Niki which is being shipped, along with her new book. Here is a sample of her work:
I encourage you to go to his website. CLYDEBUTCHER.COM
My shots while visiting
Some of my recent playing around shots:
Art of a different sort. I dont know anything about dance; however, their costumes caught my eye…
LISTENING:
I like it a lot, especially when the simple Ohhh chorus comes in.
Let’s see, what else might you enjoy, and dont forget that sometimes on YouTube your can skip their ads on the tab in the lower right corner. CLASSIC LINK to China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider.
So mellow, great guitar back and forth, and when you watch, remember that most of the audience is now 75+, IF they are still alive.
Three recent purchases and then some, I purchased The Silencer’s complete album, it’s a sound I love. Scottish group with not a lot of US air play, back then compared to U2, etc.
That’s Cactus Blossoms - Everly Brothers reincarnated.
Link to YouTube Spiritual High, State of Independence with Christie Heyne
Link to John Adorney with Daya
FLORIDA:
6 minutes of security camera footage…
LINK to IAN on Sanibel
Without the camera speeding up watch the change in velocity of the clouds. What amazed me, and you will see it, normally you have a gust of wind, it releases and does it again…this was about 5 hours of non-stop. As the ground saturated, the trees lifted. You will see the berm breached by the surge and begin flooding. This video is mild compared to what happened in other areas.
15 minutes in Port Charlotte
HUMOR:
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| Headlines from parody site BabylonBee.com |
I’m happy I’m not the only one😬
Lately for me “you’re in” became urine.
THINGS OF WHICH I AM INTERESTED:
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I took action…
Dear Claude Lyles,
Thank you for contacting the Smithsonian. Your email or letter has been received at the Smithsonian’s central Office of Visitor Services.
We apologize for the incident that occurred on Friday, Jan. 20, at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, when a security officer mistakenly told young visitors that their pro-life hats were not permitted in the museum. Asking visitors to remove hats and clothing is not in keeping with our policy or protocols. We provided immediate retraining that day to prevent a re-occurrence of this kind of error.
The Smithsonian welcomes all visitors without regard to their beliefs. We do not deny access to our museums based on the messages on visitors’ clothing. Additional information about our policies for visitors is available at www.si.edu/visit/tips.
I have forwarded your comments to staff at the National Air and Space Museum; if you’d like to follow up, you can find contact information at airandspace.si.edu/contact. Sincerely,
Office of Visitor Services
Smithsonian
<APP>WORKFLOW<TRANS>140188</TRANS><ORIG_EMAIL>info@si.edu</ORIG_EMAIL><ORIG_SERVICE_TYPE>OVS Response</ORIG_SERVICE_TYPE><ORIG_NAME>Smithsonian Office of Visitor Services</ORIG_NAME><DUE_DATE></DUE_DATE><ORIG_WFID>128459</ORIG_WFID></APP>
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Remember Claudia Cardinal? Still alive at 84. Left Hollywood for saner arena in Europe after maybe three or movies.
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It’s tomato picking time in Florida. I love to pick my own. They were planted in late November and will be gone by April 1.
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For months I have been disappointed in Peggy’s pieces, especially her unending Trump syndrome, but finally a piece worth sharing…
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The Vatican on Saturday evening published the Spiritual Testament of Benedict XVI, written on Aug. 29, 2006, one year and four months into his pontificate. Each pope writes a spiritual testament to be made public only after his death. Below is CNA’s translation of the full testament from Italian:
My spiritual testament
If in this late hour of my life I look back at the decades I have been through, first I see how many reasons I have to give thanks. First and foremost I thank God himself, the giver of every good gift, who gave me life and guided me through various confusing times; always picking me up whenever I began to slip and always giving me again the light of his face. In retrospect I see and understand that even the dark and tiring stretches of this journey were for my salvation and that it was in them that He guided me well.
I thank my parents, who gave me life in a difficult time and who, at the cost of great sacrifice, with their love prepared for me a magnificent abode that, like clear light, illuminates all my days to this day. My father’s lucid faith taught us children to believe, and as a signpost it has always been steadfast in the midst of all my scientific acquisitions; the profound devotion and great goodness of my mother represent a legacy for which I can never give thanks enough. My sister has assisted me for decades selflessly and with affectionate care; my brother, with the lucidity of his judgments, his vigorous resolve and serenity of heart, has always paved the way for me; without this constant preceding and accompanying me I could not have found the right path.
From my heart I thank God for the many friends, men and women, whom He has always placed at my side; for the collaborators in all the stages of my journey; for the teachers and students He has given me. I gratefully entrust them all to His goodness. And I want to thank the Lord for my beautiful homeland in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, in which I have always seen the splendor of the Creator Himself shining through. I thank the people of my homeland because in them I have been able again and again to experience the beauty of faith. I pray that our land remains a land of faith, and I beg you, dear countrymen: Do not let yourselves be turned away from the faith. And finally I thank God for all the beauty I have been able to experience at all the phases of my journey, especially, however, in Rome and in Italy, which has become my second homeland.
To all those whom I have wronged in any way, I heartily ask for forgiveness.
What I said before to my countrymen, I now say to all those in the Church who have been entrusted to my service: Stand firm in the faith! Do not let yourselves be confused! It often seems that science — the natural sciences on the one hand and historical research (especially exegesis of Sacred Scripture) on the other — are able to offer irrefutable results at odds with the Catholic faith. I have experienced the transformations of the natural sciences since long ago and have been able to see how, on the contrary, apparent certainties against the faith have vanished, proving to be not science, but philosophical interpretations only apparently pertaining to science; just as, on the other hand, it is in dialogue with the natural sciences that faith, too, has learned to understand better the limit of the scope of its claims, and thus its specificity. It is now sixty years that I have been accompanying the journey of Theology, particularly of the Biblical Sciences, and with the succession of different generations I have seen theses that seemed unshakable collapse, proving to be mere hypotheses: the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann etc.), the Marxist generation. I saw and see how out of the tangle of assumptions the reasonableness of faith emerged and emerges again. Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth and the life — and the Church, with all its insufficiencies, is truly His body.
Finally, I humbly ask: Pray for me, so that the Lord, despite all my sins and insufficiencies, welcomes me into the eternal dwellings. To all those entrusted to me, day by day, my heartfelt prayer goes out.
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| From my daily Grief reading… |
No words necessary…just look, 188th draft pick.
You might have heard this, I had not, popped up in an interview with Jordan Peterson when a speaker mentioned: I would rather be a Warrior In A Garden than a Gardener In A War. It makes you think.
BELOW THE FOLD: WARNING:
From a longer article on schools…I don’t see how we get out of our mess, and Black students have been severely hurt by the public school system…
“…But the results of these experiments with children are in. Sixty-seven percent of fourth-graders i--“not proficient readers” – an obviously bureaucratic formula that probably underestimates the problem. For Black children of the same age, it’s 82 percent. Phonics takes more pains, but demonstrably works.
_ And that’s just for starters. We rightly worry these days that students know shockingly little about American history, Western Civilization, the fundamentals of Old and New Testaments. But how can they if they don’t become “proficient” readers? Or when their teachers have been pervasively indoctrinated in ideologies even more damaging than poor reading “methodologies.”
It’s out of that educational witches’ brew that students – from those who never finish high school to Ivy League graduates – grow up confident that they know a great deal about our civilization, which they regard as an unrelieved expanse of evils viewed through the lenses of Critical Race Theory and “intersectionality” (i.e., mutually reinforcing claims of victimhood owing to racism, sexism, homo- and trans– phobias, micro-aggressions, “marginalization,” etc.)
They regard their own civilization as purely imperialist, colonialist, triumphalist, with no inkling of its self-critical side – mostly stemming from Christianity – about everything from slavery to economic exploitation. Absent the precise word, they’re utterly oblivious about how the pursuit of power, under the cloak of wooly notions like “equity,” inevitably replaces the pursuit of truth.”
Superstitionism is No Basis
For a System of Government.
By: Lloyd Billingsley
American Greatness
January 27, 2023
During recent election cycles, “socialism” got quite a workout, without much detail about what it actually represents. For that knowledge, one of the best sources isOut of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century by the late Sidney Hook, born in 1902, before any socialist country existed.
“Socialism was a feeling of moral protest against remediable evils that surrounded us,” Hook writes, but there was more to it. “Our socialism was an ersatz religion in that we lived in its light, were buoyed up by its promise, and prepared to make sacrifices for it.” The great philosopher was also candid about the way it worked.
“Socialist faith contrasted the realities of the capitalist system with the ideals of a vaguely defined socialism since at the time no Socialist system existed anywhere.” Once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established, Hook would conduct a proper comparison of the realities of capitalism with the realities of socialism, such as terror and violence, “the weapon of those who scorned argument and evidence.”
Lenin was the first to refer to those who did not support the Soviet regime as “vermin,” but like Stalin professed to believe that the victims of the “Red Terror” were guilty of something, however far-fetched. As Hook recalled, “they would never have admitted to the slaughter of the innocent but their apologists admitted it and justified it!” One of those apologists was dramatist Bertolt Brecht, author of The Threepenny Opera and other works.
Of the victims of Soviet terror, numbering in the millions, Brecht said, “the more innocent they are, the more they deserved to be shot.” Hook said nothing, escorted Brecht out the door, and never saw him again.
Soviet socialism was supposedly on the side of the workers, but as Hook discovered, “the workers could be exploited in a collectivist economy as well as in a free market economy.”
Soviet socialism professed to be “scientific,” but as Hook learned, there are no “national truths” in science, no “German science,” and no “Jewish science.”
In similar style, there are no “class truths” or “party truths”in science; no “proletarian science” and no such thing as“bourgeois physics” and so forth. As the philosopher explains, “this is what happens when one is in the grip of a monastic dogma,” a dogma “sustained by systematic delusion.”
Later in life, Hook came clean.
“I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature. To this day, this error and its disastrous consequences are observable in the judgment and behavior of some impassioned individuals, mostly young.” Sidney Hook wrote that in the late 1980s, and it is still true to this day, with a difference.
Socialism was never great and its colossal failures and deadly repressions have been carefully documented. Even so, current “progressives” judge socialist regimes by their rhetoric and nations such as the United States on their records. This is empowered by willful ignorance and dogma. The ersatz religion of socialism is best understood as a grab-bag of superstitions.
Consider the notion that when people gain election to office or get a government job, they automatically lose all human vices. For all but the willfully blind, they don’t. It is also pure superstition that politicians and bureaucrats never use their power against political dissenters or to the detriment of the people in general. As a matter of fact, ruling class types do it all the time.
According to popular belief, politicians and bureaucrats can plan an entire economy for the benefit of all, with no downside. F.A. Hayek refuted that superstition in The Road to Serfdom, fully endorsed by John Maynard Keynes. Ruling-class types show little familiarity with Hayek and little evidence that they read much of anything beyond the scripts penned by their handlers.
The Left contends that governments can keep printing money and continue lavish spending forever, with no downside to future generations. That is one of the most active superstitions on the current scene, along with the notion that expertise in one academic discipline automatically transfers to economics and political wisdom. For a refutation of that superstition, see Albert Einstein’s letters to Sidney Hook in Out of Step, a book rich in revelations.
For example, the Communist Party USA first promoted the idea that blacks were not real Americans and belonged in a separate “black belt” in the south. Today few recall this prescription for apartheid in America.
Hook also recalls leftist academic Herbert Marcuse, who believed that the freest societies that had ever existed, the United States in particular, were really the most repressive. Marcuse said he would prefer that American blacks not have the right to vote rather than have it and make “wrong use of their freedom.”
Like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, Sidney Hook has been there before and knows all about it. Like Aaron Neville, the great philosopher is just telling it like it is. Once a simple wish list, socialism signals only failure, repression, and death on a massive scale.
The term should be replaced by “superstitionism,” because that is what it is. Like King Arthur’s fanciful monarchy inMonty Python and the Holy Grail, superstition is no basis for a system of government.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party and other books including Bill of Writes and Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation. His journalism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator (London), and many other publications. Billingsley serves as a policy fellow with the Independent Institute.
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Babylon Bee headlines😅
Apology to anyone who has suffered a loss though violence, however…
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Biden
Biden
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Everybody go to Minnesota for their baby killing🎉
I knew they used smaller balls, so do women’s tennis…rather a softer ball, I believe.
WTF is this?
One More? Come back soon…
Mainline Florida: Link to Mainline Florida. 
Clyde Butchers’s print photo
How sad is this?????
